Class 4, Assignment 2a: OpenSim Appearance

In the video we watched that was a tutorial for setting up and customizing your avatar in Second Life, I did notice some differences. 

Instead of customizing the avatar in the same way where the settings for the body of the avatar is already set up, you have to create a new "shape" that overrides the general settings of the avatar that you have (or customize the settings of the shape that you have selected currently). This is relatively different than most of the other virtual world platforms that I've used for other classes (like avaya and cloud party) where the body of the avatar is readily customizable and doesn't need to be added to customize it, but once you do that, the general principles are similar. Below you can see me selecting to add the new shape to customize the body of the avatar. 

Then you can see from the screen shot right above that the functionality is relatively similar to what we saw in the youtube tutorial. The first type of settings are for the general body shape. You can control the height, thin/thickness, body fat, and even the hover settings of the avatar above the ground. 

The next group of avatar body settings is the head. Here you can control with sliders (very similar to the tutorial video for Second Life). Also here, one can notice that it is pretty tough to customize the settings from this far away view from the avatar. So I tried to zoom in like the tutorial discussed. 

I can click ctrl+ 0 at the same time to zoom the camera in closer to the avatar. I can keep clicking it to progressively get closer and then ctrl + 9 to zoom back out to the original setting. That can make it much easier to customize things like the facial settings or what's coming up below. 

Similar to what the tutorial showed, you can customize the eyes shown above. Also you can control the ears, nose, mouth, chin, torso, and legs. To control the skin or very specifically eyes, you can also customize them by creating a new instance of them as well similar to the new shape. 

The hair can be customized alone with the hairstyle, eyebrows and some facial settings. 

Then, if say, I like what I've set up, I can create an outfit of it. The steps to do so are slightly different.